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Re: articles

From:J. 'Mach' Wust <j_mach_wust@...>
Date:Monday, January 31, 2005, 20:53
Henrik Theiling wrote on the etymology of the indefinite article 'a':

>Simply from 'one' I suppose. In German, there's no difference.
In written German, that is. In spoken German, however, the meaning 'one' (as in the translation of 'they have one car': sie haben ein Auto) is distinguished by stress from the meaning 'a' (as in the translation of 'they have a car': sie haben ein Auto). (Of course, there's many different ways of distinguishing them in colloquial German or in regional dialects of German, as Carsten Becker's pointed out.) If I'm not wrong, the Dutch orthography distinguishes these two meaning by an acute accent, which seems a splendid idea to me, and I'm sometimes seduced to make the same use of the acute accent in German (sie haben éin Auto). kry@s: j. 'mach' wust

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Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>